Lawsuit testimony leads to new claims in settled Vallejo police cases

VALLEJO – Three plaintiffs who settled misconduct complaints against the Vallejo Police Department in recent years filed new claims against the city last week alleging that the city reached the settlements through fraud and concealment of relevant facts, therefore invalidating the previous settlements.

The plaintiffs include the family of Angel Ramos, who was killed by a Vallejo police officer in 2017; the family of Willie McCoy, who was killed by a Vallejo police officer in 2019; and Adrian Burrell, a filmmaker and former U.S. Marine who was violently arrested while filming a traffic stop on his front porch in 2019. Ramos’s family settled their claim for $2.8 million in 2022, McCoy’s family settled for $5 million last year and Burrell settled for $300,000 in 2022.

The claims allege that city officials intentionally withheld evidence of negligent hiring and previous police misconduct in each of their respective lawsuits. While a settlement typically prevents a plaintiff from bringing new litigation, it can be voided if the settlement was reached through fraud.

The Vallejo City Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

The claims are based on testimony in an ongoing lawsuit by McCoy’s niece, Deyana Jenkins, who was Tased during a traffic stop three months after her uncle was killed. Former police Capt. John Whitney testified during the lawsuit that the department kept a separate filing system for some misconduct complaints that were not turned over as required to criminal defendants. 

He and a former department recruiter also testified that the department hired officers who were unqualified. Leaked documents show that a background check had disqualified one of the officers involved in the Jenkins stop, who was also one of the six officers who killed McCoy, but the department had hired him anyway.

The Jenkins lawsuit and the three new claims were filed by Vallejo civil rights attorney Melissa Nold. Nold also filed a fourth claim on behalf of the family of a 2011 homicide victim, Enrique Jimenez. Whitney’s testimony alleged that two suspects in Jimenez’s murder were released after they revealed they had damaging information about a Vallejo police officer.

Whitney was one of two homicide investigators assigned to Jimenez’s murder. He testified that as he was at Jimenez’s home waiting for a search warrant on the day of his murder, Officer Jason Potts got a corn dog out of Jimenez’s freezer and ate it. Potts is now the chief of the Las Vegas Department of Public Safety.

Later, when investigators brought two brothers in for questioning about the murder, the brothers said that their mother was having an affair with then-Officer Steve Darden, who is now a lieutenant, and that he was visiting her while claiming to be at work. According to Whitney, Sgt. Kevin Bartlett stopped the interview and confiscated the recording. The brothers were released.

Whitney testified that he later asked then-Lt. Lee Horton about the outcome, and Horton said that Darden had been placed on family medical leave and there was no further investigation.

“Enrique’s suspected killers are free to this day because of the corrupt criminals at Vallejo PD,” Nold said in a statement. “Enrique deserves justice and his family deserves answers.”

The Jimenez family’s complaint alleges civil conspiracy, fraud, neglect of mandatory duty, negligence, and that the Vallejo Police Department was an accessory after the fact to Jimenez’s murder.

Whitney was later promoted to captain and placed in charge of the professional standards division, which includes internal affairs. While there, he discovered that the department had a separate filing system for citizen complaints: one for complaints that had been investigated and another for so-called “informal resolutions,” complaints that were withdrawn after a conversation with an officer. 

After McCoy was killed in 2019, Whitney alleged that one of the officers’ badges had two bent tips representing the two people he had killed on duty, and that multiple officers had been marking shootings on their badges this way. But after Whitney raised the issue with department leaders and city officials, he was fired for allegedly deleting the content of his department-issued cellphone during a leak investigation.

Whitney sued the department and revealed the badge bending scandal publicly in 2020. Meanwhile, the department hired a new police chief with a reform mission, who in turn hired two recruiters to professionalize the department’s hiring practices. One of the recruiters, former San Jose police Officer Ron Tabron, testified in Jenkins’ lawsuit that the department had hired officers who were rejected by other agencies or were facing internal affairs investigations.

The Vallejo Sun revealed in July that one of the officers who killed McCoy and stopped Jenkins, Colin Eaton, had been disqualified by a background check before Vallejo police hired him, and rejected by three previous agencies because he arranged a sham marriage to get a housing stipend from the U.S. Marine Corps.

In Jenkins’ case, Nold has sought to prove that Vallejo police participated in a custom or policy of violating people’s rights, a notoriously difficult to prove legal standard that could lead to court-ordered reforms of the department. 

She said that during the Jenkins litigation, the city disclosed approximately 185 misconduct records and 150 of the records had never been disclosed in prior cases, including the Ramos, McCoy and Burrell cases.

“The City of Vallejo intentionally concealed records to reduce settlement outcomes and discourage public outcry related to their astronomical number of misconduct complaints,” Nold wrote in the complaint.